How the Dems Do It

I've always wondered why. Why do African Americans vote 90 percent for Democrats? And why do Jewish Americans vote 75 to 80 percent for Democrats?

The fact is that, unless you apply extraordinary pressure to people, they won't sort out that strongly. You only have to talk to people to realize how much they vary in their opinions, for no apparent reason.

If you are an evolutionist, that makes sense. People naturally cover the waterfront on opinion. Some people end up right. Some people end up wrong, er, left.

The only way you can make people line up in agreement is to frighten them. There's nothing scandalous about that. It's just the way humans organize against a perceived threat. Hate and fear are the drivers of unity.

So I always wondered: how do Dems manage to frighten African Americans? How to you get to the natural division of, say 60-70 percent to 80-90 percent? I knew about guys like Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton. But they coudn't put fear and hate of Republicans into the entire population of African Americans. Could they?

Then came 2008 and Reverend Wright. Now it all makes sense. If every large city has a preacher or two like President Obama's Reverend Wright, then you've got the horsepower to keep 80-90 percent of African Americans frightened of white America, and determined to stay together to defend themselves against the threat of white racism.

Obviously, activists are doing something similar to keep the Jews at home in the Democratic Party. But how?

The fact is that Jews are afraid of Christians, and with reason. Down the ages, whenever things went wrong, Christians blamed the Jews. When the Black Death spread across Europe in 1348, for instance, Christians started to accuse the Jews of poisoning the wells. So Jews are trained, you might say, to expect trouble from Christians. Of course, in the 20th century, the main threat came first from racist Nazis and then from classist Communists. Then the Arabs decided to wipe Israel off the map. And now in Europe the secular left is turning against Jews and against Israel, especially in the universities.

Yet Jews are still frightened of Christians, even in the United States where conservative Christians are particular friends of Israel.

Then it came to me, as I read the rant of a liberal acquaintance about how conservative Christians want to create a theocracy. Eureka! That's how it's done! You don't really need a conspiracy. Liberals are naturally annoyed with the rise of conservative Christians. All it needs is enough people--like our friends in the netroots, for instance--to rage away at the Religious Right and worry about an imagined danger of theocracy and you'll keep the Jews frightened of Christians and keep them home in the Democratic Party.

But one day, of course, the whole climate of hate and fear will collapse. One day some issue will come up, and the scales will fall of the eyes of African Americans or of the Jews. But that day is not yet.

But we are conservatives. We are optimists. Some day, our liberal friends will drive African Americans and Jewish Americans out of the Democratic Party. One day the fear play won't work any more. And it can't come soon enough. For all our sakes.

When the President Tells a "Porky"

They say that the time to get up and shout is when a politician stops lying. So Rep Joe Wilson (R-SC) was wrong to yell: "You Lie!" to President Obama when the president said:

There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false - the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

Strictly speaking, if you parse his remarks carefully, the president is correct. There is nothing in the House bill that applies to illegal aliens. So they would continue to get health care just as they do today. They wouldn't be insured. But they would be covered. So Joe Wilson was wrong.

Anyway, it's not nice to call the president a liar. Grandma wouldn't like it. But we need a way to tell the president that he isn't fooling anyone with his lawyer-like evasions. It should be something that Grandma wouldn't mind. It would be nice if she could get a chuckle out of it.

Here's what I suggest. Any time the president tells a "porky," we should shout: "Lina Lamont!"

You remember Lina. She was the fictional silent-screen star in Singin' in the Rain that had a whiny Jersey accent that you could cut with a knife. Lina, played by the immortal Jean Hagen, was beautiful, but she had the manners, the mind and, most important of all, the voice of a gangster's moll.

Lina Lamont was one tough cookie. She knew how to take care of herself, or thought she could. Whenever Lina Lamont thought that the management of Monumental Pictures was trying to put one over on her, she would recite the following immortal line:

What do yer think I am? Dumb or something?

So here's my mild and humble suggestion. When the president tells a "porky" don't yell "You Lie!" No. That would be too coarse.

In future, when the president tells a porky, yell "Lina Lamont!"

Then when the mainstream media asks what that was all about, you answer: "What does the president think I am. Dumb or something?"

Mr President, Tear Down This Plan

President Obama is addressing the nation today on health care. But the girls got their word in first. Camille Paglia wants heads to roll at the White House. She wonders how the president's staff could have allowed such a train wreck over health care and over everything else.

As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year.

Yeah, that's right. In this consumer society political contributor Paglia expects to get good value for money.

And then there's Sarah Palin, doubling down on "death panels" in the Wall Street Journal. She quotes Ronald Reagan, " that 'no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds.'" But then she takes apart President Obama's op-ed on health care in the New York Times. You go girl!

How can we ensure that those who need medical care receive it while also reducing health-care costs? The answers offered by Democrats in Washington all rest on one principle: that increased government involvement can solve the problem. I fundamentally disagree.

You know what is so refreshing? Sarah Palin is arguing from first principles.

News reports today suggest that President Obama is not going to abandon his "public option." So I call on President Obama, at this last moment, to abandon his unjust plan.

What really sticks in my craw about most liberal policies is the crude compulsion. It is not enough to tax all Americans to pay for liberal programs to help the poor, even though the programs usually devastate rather than build up. Comes the day when liberals decide that it's not enough to screw the poor. No. Liberals want everyone has to submit to the liberal program themselves. Because liberals want it.

I have no problem if liberals want to join together in pre-paid health cooperatives, like Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. If that's what they want, good for them.

But that's not enough for liberals. Everyone else has to join their lovely cooperative plan too.

The president's plan is advertised as an expansion of health benefits. Maybe it is, in a way. But the main thrust seems to me to corral the folks that are dodging out of paying for health insurance--the young, the unemployed, the illegal, the rich--and make them pay.

Now, there may be an argument for trying to capture these free-loaders and make them pay. But surely it is not necessary to turn the health care system into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Congress in order to do so. Apart from the crudity, it utterly misunderstands the nature of health care--indeed any human need. Hugh Hewitt's Clark Judge:

Social democratic models of policy reform assume we know everything we need to know about how to do things right. Social democrats believe it just takes a rational government t[o] bring that knowledge to bear. In contrast, market models assume that knowledge is limited and that progress comes through experiments – often entrepreneurial experiments -- in which the determinant of success is the cumulative impact of choices that millions of people make in their own lives with their own money.

This is the basic argument that F.A. Hayek made sixty years ago, and it is the fundamental problem we conservatives have with all liberal government programs. How do you know that your administrative 1,000 page bill really comprehends the problem? And how can you suppose that you have the bandwidth to adapt the program to changing circumstances even if your program is exactly right for today?

The fact is that the satisfaction of every human need is a moving target. It changes all the time as conditions and knowledge changes. People find new ways of satisfying human needs, and the world changes.

But this ObamaCare proposal will cast the provision of health care in concrete. It will make it much harder to change health care in the future. And it will encourage Americans to come to government to force society to provide them with their needs instead of working it out on their own.

Mr. President. Tear down this plan!

Never Trust Experts

The New York Times columnist and liberal economist Paul Krugman had a deeply misleading article in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, titled "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

Misleading? Well, he represents that economists, especially the neoclassical kind, believe in a rational model of the economy, and were taken by surprise when the credit system collapsed a year ago. There's an argument between "freshwater" economists in the heartland and "saltwater" economists on the coasts as to what, if anything macroeconomics could or should do about regulating the economy.

I'll have more to say on Krugman's argument later. But let us at least start with this.

All economists are experts that want to influence government policy. And they all seem to believe in some sort of rational bureaucratic model of economic policy. They want to be the political advisers of whom Lord Salisbury said: "Never trust experts."

That's because experts are people on the fringes of political power who want their pet theories implemented by the politicians. They aren't really principals with ownership and responsibilities. They are just bit players who would do anything for a starring role.

Since the advent of big government, say at the turn of the twentieth century, the big economic problem has been how to deal with the dreadful distortions that governments routinely impose upon national economies. The monetarism of Milton Friedman is one attempt to deal with the problem. The Keynesianism of liberal economists is another.

But both approaches are grossly simplistic, and really fail to deal with the central problem.

The problem is that politicians and special interests are eternally trying to game the economic system for their benefit. In the 1920s politicians were trying to game the system to deal with the distortions created by the Great War and the reparations imposed upon Germany. And in the United States there were people trying to gun the economy to increase home affordability.

Of course, all this meddling produced all kinds of unexpected results. And in addition, when the economy turned south in 1929, the newly created Federal Reserve Board wasn't up to the job and didn't really know what to do. Why be surprised. The nation's de-facto central banker, J.P. Morgan, had been replaced by political hacks. So the Fed temporized, as political hacks will do--and allowed a ton of banks to fail.

In the 1990s the economy was naturally boomed by a remarkable technical revolution. But it was also being boomed by a vast increase in credit for home mortgages driven by the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We now know that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were disasters waiting to happen. But the economists didn't seem to think so. Not at the time. I remember being troubled by the housing boom, but I didn't realize the exact mechanism: the sub-prime loans that were driven by political mandates on the banks. And I didn't think that the Fed would let a major bank like Lehman Brothers fail.

The point is that the silly intramural quarrels over monetarism and Keynesianism rather miss the point when you've generated $5 trillion in Fannie/Freddie mortgages that completely overwhelm the market operations of the Federal Reserve Board. I didn't read too many academic economists putting their fingers on this problem. But I remember wondering why the Monetary Base was going up so slowly in the mod 2000s when it was clear that credit was booming.

My argument is that this argument between monetarists and Keynesians is what President Obama would call a "false choice." The problem is that government is trying to game the economic system all the time and that makes it very difficult for markets to provide a clear signal to investors.

We need a lot less gaming, a lot less leverage and a lot more equity in the markets. And that should start with government. It's got to stop favoring special interests with cheap credit.

The Sad Decline of Unions

Today the Gallup Poll puts out its annual poll on labor unions. Alas, unions have suffered a sharp drop in popularity in the past year.

A year ago Gallup asked "do you approve or disapprove of labor unions," and 59 percent of Americans said they approved. Now, only 48 percent approve.

The 48% of Americans now approving of unions represents the first sub-50% approval since Gallup first asked the question in the 1930s. The previous low was 55%, found in both 1979 and 1981.

When unions emerged in the 19th century they were spontaneous groupings of working people joining together to generate genuine collective benefits. They flourished most often during inflationary periods when wages were declining. Apart from bargaining over wages, unions offered their members significant benefits such as health care and death payments. They were similar to the fraternal associations that also provided mutual aid to their members.

But then unions got involved in politics and they started supporting the welfare state. So unionism became a political movement rather than a social movement. Of course, if the government provides benefits, who needs the unions.

Today labor unions are the major prop supporting the Democratic Party. Their agenda is a political agenda, trying to game the system through changing the law on labor union certification, and providing "astroturf" to support the Obama administration's legislative agenda.

And, of course, the Obama administration has done a lot to help labor unions, most notably in the bailout of the auto companies, General Motors and Chrysler, that died in part because of union power.

All social institutions have their day, and inevitably decline. When workers get more prosperous and confident of their ability to compete in the job market, they get less inclined to want the protection, the solidarity, of a labor union. Then they only need them as a lobbying force, as in government worker unions.

But still the romance of labor continues, and we celebrate Labor Day each year,

We humans have other nostalgic notions, like the notion of the family farm. That notion costs us a bundle, too.

Our Community Organizer in Chief

The trouble with Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals is that its a manual of tactics. OK. tactics are important. But without strategy you are wasting your time.

The whole community-organizing thing seems, to me, to be a foolish emphasis on tactics. But for what? You rile up the poor folks in South Chicago into a fine froth, and then what? OK, we know. Then you implement The Plan, to fold everything into the State.

But what happens if, after you've riled up the People, and you start confidently leading them into a Glorious Future of Health Care and Green Jobs, the People suddenly discover that that's not what they had in mind at all.

What happens if the People are not desperate proletarians scrabbling a living out in the inner city? What happens if they are small "c" conservative middle-class folks that want a sensible and steady economic environment without all the excitement. They would be people that want to get jobs, get married, start a family, and squeeze enough cash to buy a starter house? Or if they are a bit older, and are thinking about paying for college or even retirement?

Well, if you are the community-organizing President of the United States, you've got a problem. All of a sudden your vision of change, complete with transparency and tax cuts, comes crashing down. All of a sudden you look like the usual politician that's talking about fighting for the people while he's doing deals with the powerful.

The feeling that I'm getting is that the president and his crew came all kitted up to play the wrong game.

They say that the president and his top campaign advisers all have a background in big-city politics. That explains a lot, doesn't it. These folks are good at playing the Democratic faithful, but don't really know much about politics in the heartland.

But the game you need to play in the United States of America is center-right politics. That's what Bill Clinton was so good at. He knew how to push through center-left stuff and make it look center-right. He learned his game as a liberal in a conservative southern state.

But President Obama has spent most of his adult life in Liberal Land, the liberal enclave of Hyde Park created by the University of Chicago.

Well, eventually, the Obama people will figure out how to get their presidency to limp along. Maybe they'll even limp to a reelection in 2012.

The problem is that from now on out, liberals are going to be facing hard decisions. The bills are coming due on the welfare state and there isn't enough money to pay for it. They'll do what politicians always do. They'll cheat.

Guess what. It is going to make the American people as mad as hell.

Like they say: you ain't seen nothing yet.

Liberals Not Getting It

I belong to a liberal group in Seattle that meets to discuss "integral theory." This integral theory grows out of developmental psychology: that people live in and grow through different developmental stages. The group experiences itself as transcending the liberal culture of sharing and caring and moving to a higher plane where you can understand the beliefs of peoples and cultures that don't think like you.

But now, after the Summer of the TeaPartiers and Townhallers, they are perplexed. Writes Gary:

I've been wrestling with myself, as well, trying to define just what is the highest response to this unholy alliance between right-wing political ideologies and right-wing Christian movement in the United States today that confuses soldier and warrior, prophet and soldier.

Another participant, Don, relates the culture war to the health care issue:

I have been trying to get my head around the unhinged response in some quarters to the health care proposals coming out of congress[...] So, the question I have is, is there a [way of communicating] that would resonate with those in this country who currently see health care reform as the implementation of death panels or whatever?

I think there's a rather simple answer to this. The problem is that the president's health care proposal isn't "integral." I.e., it doesn't treat people as naturally different, and with a right to be different. It assumes that health care is a public good and that everyone's needs are the same, and the government ought to provide for these needs.

But if we move to such a system a lot of people are going to have to change. Some people at present take no provision for health care and act on the assumption that, if they need care, society will provide it. Some people have a complete pre-paid plan. Some people have insurance to protect their assets. Some people like to pay for routine medical care out of pocket and only have insurance against major risks. Some people are rich enough that they can afford to pay all their health care out of pocket. If the president's program is passed, all this will change. Or more exactly, armed with new powers, the government will force people to change.

Very often in human history, you will find that people react to force with force.

The point is that in a free country, people have the right to make mistakes. So even if policy analysts come up with the best of all possible health policies, people should still have the right to say "no thanks." In fact, of course, the experts do not typically come up with the best of all policies. Their brilliant ideas get shredded by the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The interesting thing to me is that the liberals quoted up above have studied and believe that people at different developmental levels can and do have different ways of understanding the world and living in the world, and this is natural and normal. Yet the first one can still regard people that don't think like him as evil, and the second can be perplexed that people might react to a one-size-fits-all government program with rage.

Is this a great country or what!